Facebook’s Automated Ad Creation (Is It Worth Testing?)

As I was looking through my notifications on my Facebook Page, I saw the Ad Center tab. Normally, I ignore the Ad Center and all notifications related to it. Since a large portion of my business is creating and managing ads through the Ad Manager it would be weird to use the Automated Ad Creation tool, right? Well, I decided to give it a try and here’s what happened.

Campaign Creation

After clicking on the Ad Center tab, you’re taken to a page where you can see a quick overview of all your current and past promotions. Note: this page does not show ads created in the Ad Manager, only ads that were created within this page.

In the top right corner, there is the option to create a new ad, so that’s what I did.

When you click the Create Ad button, a window pops up and the ad creation process begins. Exciting!

First, you’ll need to select the ad account you’ll be using to pay for these ads. Simple enough.

How would you describe your business?

How would you prefer to communicate with customers?

What’s the best way for people to contact you? Carrier pigeon wasn’t an option ☹️.

Confirm your answers and then you get to start the ad creation process!

Facebook does its best to create ads for you using your Business Page’s about answers and images from your past posts. All this can be edited though.

After a couple minutes of editing, I have 4 ads ready to launch.

Select your target audience. If you have previously built a target audience, you can select that or create a new audience here.

Choose one of the suggested daily budgets or choose your own and just like that, you’ve got a campaign ready to launch.

Results/Conclusion

I ran my campaign for 7 days (Monday – Sunday) and ended up spending a total of $20.81 for reaching 148 people, getting 1 link click, and 0 messages. To me, it looks like the Automated Ad service is not worth the investment. Sure, the setup was quick and easy but the results were very poor. In my opinion, you’re better off creating a campaign through the ad manager.